The 16th Theory Atelier: “A Community without the Common: On the Impossibility of Korean Democracy”
<Overview> A Community Without the Common: On the Impossibility of Korean Democracy is a book that examines Korean modernization and democracy from an anthropological perspective. More specifically, the book is theoretically grounded in three concepts: 1) Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-minoritarian,”2026-06-01
The 15th Theory Atelier: “A Symptomatology of Exhaustion”
<Overview> Exhaustion is often used in ways that overlap with depression, burnout, and fatigue, yet it is a concept whose universality and metaphorical force exceed the psychological dimension of the individual. It refers not only to the depletion of human2026-04-24
The 14th Theory Atelier: “Testimonies of Emotion, Montage of Symptoms”
<Overview> In Le Témoin jusqu’au bout: Une lecture de Victor Klemperer (2022; “The Witness to the End: A Reading of Victor Klemperer”), Georges Didi-Huberman examines what emotion is and how we might understand the language that bears witness to it.2026-01-23
The 13th Theory Atelier: “Surviving as Non/Human in an Apocalyptic World: Neoliberal Co-mix Storytelling and the Aesthetics of Relational Survivance”
<Overview> In Part III, “Reassembled Fringes,” of Worm-Time: Memories of Division in South Korean Aesthetics (Cornell University Press, 2024), We Jung Yi approaches webtoon storytelling—which emerged in the early 2010s as a major content trend among digital-native generations—as a form2025-11-20
The 12th Theory Atelier: “Queer Politics of the Wounded”
<Overview> How do communities formed through structural harm respond to social wounds and become political subjects? How can the queer politics of the wounded move beyond the logic of suffering and resentment? To address these questions, I introduce the concept2025-09-29
2025 SNU International Conference Session: “Reading Cultural Symptoms of Korea”
SNU Contemporary Korean Studies held an international conference under the theme “Korea as Symptom” on August 22 and 23. On the final session of the first day, the K-Future Team presented a panel titled “Reading Cultural Symptoms of Korea.” Chaired2025-08-22
2025 SNU International Conference Session: “Walking as Object-Method in Korean Studies”
SNU Contemporary Korean Studies held an international conference under the theme “Korea as Symptom” on August 22 and 23. The K-Future Team opened the conference with the panel “Walking as Object-Method in Korean Studies,” exploring how walking, as an everyday2025-08-22
The 11th Theory Atelier: “Habermas’s 2019 Study of Confucianism and Dialogue between Eastern and Western Civilizations”
<Overview> Although Confucianism is discussed in Habermas’s Also a History of Philosophy (2019) as one of the Axial traditions, its status as a world-view of “immanent transcendence” has not been sufficiently explicated. In order to do so, one needs not2025-07-16
The 10th Theory Atelier: “Moishe Postone: A Critical Theory That Critiques Critical Theory”
<Overview> This presentation examines the possibilities of contemporary critical theory through the work of Moishe Postone (1942–2018), the Jewish-Canadian critical theorist based in the United States. Against claims about the “end of critique” or the “end of critical theory” associated2025-05-26
The 9th Theory Atelier: “(Back to the) Future Fieldwork”
<Overview> How to reflect on K-Future methodologically? In this lecture, I discuss my current research project on “post- and meta-urban Korea” in its framework and methods, after three decades of crafting the contours of my ethnographic methods, involving critical reflection2025-05-09